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---
stage: none
group: unassigned
comments: false
description: 'Next Runner Auto-scaling Architecture'
---
# Next Runner Auto-scaling Architecture
## Summary
GitLab Runner is a core component of GitLab CI/CD. It makes it possible to run
CI/CD jobs in a reliable and concurrent environment. It has been initially
introduced by Kamil Trzciński in early 2015 to replace a Ruby version of the
same service. GitLab Runner written in Go turned out to be easier to use by the
wider community, it was more efficient and reliable than the previous,
Ruby-based, version.
In February 2016 Kamil Trzciński [implemented an auto-scaling feature ](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/merge_requests/53 )
to leverage cloud infrastructure to run many CI/CD jobs in parallel. This
feature has become a foundation supporting CI/CD adoption on GitLab.com over
the years, where we now run around 4 million builds per day at peak.
During the initial implementation a decision was made to use Docker Machine:
> Is easy to use. Is well documented. Is well supported and constantly
> extended. It supports almost any cloud provider or virtualization
> infrastructure. We need minimal amount of changes to support Docker Machine:
> machine enumeration and inspection. We don't need to implement any "cloud
> specific" features.
This design choice was crucial for the GitLab Runner success. Since that time
the auto-scaling feature has been used by many users and customers and enabled
rapid growth of CI/CD adoption on GitLab.com.
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We can not, however, continue using Docker Machine. Work on that project
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[was paused in July 2018 ](https://github.com/docker/machine/issues/4537 ) and there
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was no development made since that time (except for some highly important
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security fixes). In 2018, after Docker Machine entered the "maintenance mode",
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we decided to create [our own fork ](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/ci-cd/docker-machine )
to be able to keep using this and ship fixes and updates needed for our use case.
[On September 26th, 2021 the project got archived ](https://github.com/docker/docker.github.io/commit/2dc8b49dcbe85686cc7230e17aff8e9944cb47a5 )
and the documentation for it has been removed from the official page. This
means that the original reason to use Docker Machine is no longer valid too.
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To keep supporting our customers and the wider community and to improve our SaaS runners
maintenance we need to design a new mechanism for GitLab Runner auto-scaling. It not only
needs to support auto-scaling, but it also needs to do that in the way to enable us to
build on top of it to improve efficiency, reliability and availability.
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We call this new mechanism the "next GitLab Runner Scaling architecture".
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_Disclaimer The following contain information related to upcoming products,
features, and functionality._
_It is important to note that the information presented is for informational
purposes only. Please do not rely on this information for purchasing or
planning purposes._
_As with all projects, the items mentioned in this document and linked pages are
subject to change or delay. The development, release and timing of any
products, features, or functionality remain at the sole discretion of GitLab
Inc._
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## Continuing building on Docker Machine
At this moment one of our core products - GitLab Runner - and one of its most
important features - ability to auto-scale job execution environments - depends
on an external product that is abandoned.
Docker Machine project itself is also hard to maintain. Its design starts to
show its age, which makes it hard to bring new features and fixes. A huge
codebase that it brings with a lack of internal knowledge about it makes it
hard for our maintainers to support and properly handle incoming feature
requests and community contributions.
Docker Machine and it integrated 20+ drivers for cloud and virtualization
providers creates also another subset of problems, like:
- Each cloud/virtualization environment brings features that come and go
and we would need to maintain support for them (add new features, fix
bugs).
- We basically need to become experts for each of the virtualization/cloud
provider to properly support integration with their API,
- Every single provider that Docker Machine integrates with has its
bugs, security releases, vulnerabilities - to maintain the project properly
we would need to be on top of all of that and handle updates whenever
they are needed.
Another problem is the fact that Docker Machine, from its beginnings, was
focused on managing Linux based instances only. Despite that at some moment
Docker got official and native integration on Windows, Docker Machine never
followed this step. Nor its designed to make such integration easy.
There is also no support for MacOS. This one is obvious - Docker Machine is a
tool to maintain hosts for Docker Engine and there is no native Docker Engine
for MacOS. And by native we mean MacOS containers executed within MacOS
operating system. Docker for MacOS product is not a native support - it's just
a tooling and a virtualized Linux instance installed with it that makes it
easier to develop **Linux containers** on MacOS development instances.
This means that only one of three of our officially supported platforms -
Linux, Windows and MacOS - have a fully-featured support for CI/CD
auto-scaling. For Windows there is a possibility to use Kubernetes (which in
some cases have limitations) and maybe with a lot of effort we could bring
support for Windows into Docker Machine. But for MacOS, there is no
auto-scaling solution provided natively by GitLab Runner.
This is a huge limitation for our users and a frequently requested feature.
It's also a limitation for our SaaS runners offering. We've maintained to
create some sort of auto-scaling for our SaaS Windows and SaaS MacOS runners
hacking around Custom executor. But experiences from past three years show
that it's not the best way of doing this. And yet, after this time, Windows
and MacOS runners autoscaling lacks a lot of performance and feature support
that we have with our SaaS Linux runners.
To keep supporting our customers and the wider community and to improve our
SaaS runners maintenance we need to design a new mechanism for GitLab Runner
auto-scaling. It not only needs to support auto-scaling, but it also needs to
do that in the way to enable us to build on top of it to improve efficiency,
reliability and availability.
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## Proposal
Currently, GitLab Runner auto-scaling can be configured in a few ways. Some
customers are successfully using an auto-scaled environment in Kubernetes. We
know that a custom and unofficial GitLab Runner version has been built to make
auto-scaling on Kubernetes more reliable. We recognize the importance of having
a really good Kubernetes solution for running multiple jobs in parallel, but
refinements in this area are out of scope for this architectural initiative.
We want to focus on resolving problems with Docker Machine and replacing this
mechanism with a reliable and flexible mechanism. We might be unable to build a
drop-in replacement for Docker Machine, as there are presumably many reasons
why it has been deprecated. It is very difficult to maintain compatibility with
so many cloud providers, and it seems that Docker Machine has been deprecated
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in favor of Docker Desktop, which is not a viable replacement for us.
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[This issue ](https://github.com/docker/roadmap/issues/245 ) contains a discussion
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about how people are using Docker Machine right now, and it seems that GitLab
CI is one of the most frequent reasons for people to keep using Docker Machine.
There is also an opportunity in being able to optionally run multiple jobs in a
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single, larger virtual machine. We can't do that today, but we know that this
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can potentially significantly improve efficiency. We might want to build a new
architecture that makes it easier and allows us to test how efficient it is
with PoCs. Running multiple jobs on a single machine can also make it possible
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to reuse what we call a "sticky context" - a space for build artifacts / user
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data that can be shared between job runs.
### 💡 Design a simple abstraction that users will be able to build on top of
Because there is no viable replacement and we might be unable to support all
cloud providers that Docker Machine used to support, the key design requirement
is to make it really simple and easy for the wider community to write a custom
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GitLab plugin for whatever cloud provider they might be using. We
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want to design a simple abstraction that users will be able to build on top, as
will we to support existing workflows on GitLab.com.
The designed mechanism should abstract what Docker Machine executor has been doing:
providing a way to create an external Docker environment, waiting to execute
jobs by provisioning this environment and returning credentials required to
perform these operations.
The new plugin system should be available for all major platforms: Linux,
Windows, MacOS.
### 💡 Migrate existing Docker Machine solution to a plugin
Once we design and implement the new abstraction, we should be able to migrate
existing Docker Machine mechanisms to a plugin. This will make it possible for
users and customers to immediately start using the new architecture, but still
keep their existing workflows and configuration for Docker Machine. This will
give everyone time to migrate to the new architecture before we drop support
for the legacy auto-scaling entirely.
### 💡 Build plugins for AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Azure
Although we might be unable to add support for all the cloud providers that
Docker Machine used to support, it seems to be important to provide
GitLab-maintained plugins for the major cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud
Platform and Azure.
We should build them, presumably in separate repositories, in a way that they
are easy to contribute to, fork, modify for certain needs the wider community
team members might have. It should be also easy to install a new plugin without
the need of rebuilding GitLab Runner whenever it happens.
### 💡 Write a solid documentation about how to build your own plugin
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It is important to show users how to build a plugin, so that they
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can implement support for their own cloud infrastructure.
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Building new plugins should be simple and supported with great
documentation. We want to design the plugin system in a way that the entry barrier
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for contributing new plugins is very low.
### 💡 Build a PoC to run multiple builds on a single machine
We want to better understand what kind of efficiency can running multiple jobs
on a single machine bring. It is difficult to predict that, so ideally we
should build a PoC that will help us to better understand what we can expect
from this.
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To run this experiment we most likely we will need to build an experimental
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plugin, that not only allows us to schedule running multiple builds on a single
machine, but also has a set of comprehensive metrics built into it, to make it
easier to understand how it performs.
## Details
How the abstraction for the custom provider will look exactly is something that
we will need to prototype, PoC and decide in a data-informed way. There are a
few proposals that we should describe in detail, develop requirements for, PoC
and score. We will choose the solution that seems to support our goals the
most.
In order to describe the proposals we first need to better explain what part of
the GitLab Runner needs to be abstracted away. To make this easier to grasp
these concepts, let's take a look at the current auto-scaling architecture and
sequence diagram.
On the diagrams above we see that currently a GitLab Runner Manager runs on a
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machine that has access to a cloud provider's API. It is using Docker Machine
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to provision new Virtual Machines with Docker Engine installed and it
configures the Docker daemon there to allow external authenticated requests. It
stores credentials to such ephemeral Docker environments on disk. Once a
machine has been provisioned and made available for GitLab Runner Manager to
run builds, it is using one of the existing executors to run a user-provided
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script. In auto-scaling, this is typically done using the Docker executor.
### Separation of concerns
There are several concerns represented in the current architecture. They are
coupled in the current implementation so we will break them out here to consider
them each separately.
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- **Virtual Machine (VM) shape**. The underlying provider of a VM requires configuration to
know what kind of machine to create. E.g. Cores, memory, failure domain,
etc... This information is very provider specific.
- **VM lifecycle management**. Multiple machines will be created and a
system must keep track of which machines belong to this executor. Typically
a cloud provider will have a way to manage a set of homogenous machines.
E.g. GCE Instance Group. The basic operations are increase, decrease and
usually delete a specific machine.
- **VM autoscaling**. In addition to low-level lifecycle management,
job-aware capacity decisions must be made to the set of machines to provide
capacity when it is needed but not maintain excess capacity for cost reasons.
- **Job to VM mapping (routing)**. Currently the system assigns only one job to a
given a machine. A machine may be reused based on the specific executor
configuration.
- **In-VM job execution**. Within each VM a job must be driven through
various pre-defined stages and results and trace information returned
to the Runner system. These details are highly dependent on the VM
architecture and operating system as well as Executor type.
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The current architecture has several points of coupling between concerns.
Coupling reduces opportunities for abstraction (e.g. community supported
plugins) and increases complexity, making the code harder to understand,
test, maintain and extend.
A primary design decision will be which concerns to externalize to the plugin
and which should remain with the runner system. The current implementation
has several abstractions internally which could be used as cut points for a
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new abstraction.
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For example the [`Build` ](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/blob/267f40d871cd260dd063f7fbd36a921fedc62241/common/build.go#L125 )
type uses the [`GetExecutorProvider` ](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/blob/267f40d871cd260dd063f7fbd36a921fedc62241/common/executor.go#L171 )
function to get an executor provider based on a dispatching executor string.
Various executor types register with the system by being imported and calling
[`RegisterExecutorProvider` ](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/blob/267f40d871cd260dd063f7fbd36a921fedc62241/common/executor.go#L154 )
during initialization. Here the abstractions are the [`ExecutorProvider` ](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/blob/267f40d871cd260dd063f7fbd36a921fedc62241/common/executor.go#L80 )
and [`Executor` ](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/blob/267f40d871cd260dd063f7fbd36a921fedc62241/common/executor.go#L59 )
interfaces.
Within the `docker+autoscaling` executor the [`machineExecutor` ](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/blob/267f40d871cd260dd063f7fbd36a921fedc62241/executors/docker/machine/machine.go#L19 )
type has a [`Machine` ](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/blob/267f40d871cd260dd063f7fbd36a921fedc62241/helpers/docker/machine.go#L7 )
interface which it uses to aquire a VM during the common [`Prepare` ](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/blob/267f40d871cd260dd063f7fbd36a921fedc62241/executors/docker/machine/machine.go#L71 )
phase. This abstraction primarily creates, accesses and deletes VMs.
There is no current abstraction for the VM autoscaling logic. It is tightly
coupled with the VM lifecycle and job routing logic. Creating idle capacity
happens as a side-effect of calling [`Acquire` ](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/blob/267f40d871cd260dd063f7fbd36a921fedc62241/executors/docker/machine/provider.go#L449 ) on the `machineProvider` while binding a job to a VM.
There is also no current abstraction for in-VM job execution. VM-specific
commands are generated by the Runner Manager using the [`GenerateShellScript` ](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/blob/267f40d871cd260dd063f7fbd36a921fedc62241/common/build.go#L336 )
function and [injected ](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/blob/267f40d871cd260dd063f7fbd36a921fedc62241/common/build.go#L373 )
into the VM as the manager drives the job execution stages.
### Design principles
Our goal is to design a GitLab Runner plugin system interface that is flexible
and simple for the wider community to consume. As we cannot build plugins for
all cloud platforms, we want to ensure a low entry barrier for anyone who needs
to develop a plugin. We want to allow everyone to contribute.
To achieve this goal, we will follow a few critical design principles. These
principles will guide our development process for the new plugin system
abstraction.
#### General high-level principles
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- Design the new auto-scaling architecture aiming for having more choices and
flexibility in the future, instead of imposing new constraints.
- Design the new auto-scaling architecture to experiment with running multiple
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jobs in parallel, on a single machine.
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- Design the new provisioning architecture to replace Docker Machine in a way
that the wider community can easily build on top of the new abstractions.
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- New auto-scaling method should become a core component of GitLab Runner product so that
we can simplify maintenance, use the same tooling, test configuration and Go language
setup as we do in our other main products.
- It should support multiple job execution environments - not only Docker containers
on Linux operating system.
The best design would be to bring auto-scaling as a feature wrapped around
our current executors like Docker or Shell.
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#### Principles for the new plugin system
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- Make the entry barrier for writing a new plugin low.
- Developing a new plugin should be simple and require only basic knowledge of
a programming language and a cloud provider's API.
- Strive for a balance between the plugin system's simplicity and flexibility.
These are not mutually exclusive.
- Abstract away as many technical details as possible but do not hide them completely.
- Build an abstraction that serves our community well but allows us to ship it quickly.
- Invest in a flexible solution, avoid one-way-door decisions, foster iteration.
- When in doubts err on the side of making things more simple for the wider community.
- Limit coupling between concerns to make the system more simple and extensible.
- Concerns should live on one side of the plug or the other--not both, which
duplicates effort and increases coupling.
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#### The most important technical details
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- Favor gRPC communication between a plugin and GitLab Runner.
- Make it possible to version communication interface and support many versions.
- Make Go a primary language for writing plugins but accept other languages too.
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- Autoscaling mechanism should be fully owned by GitLab.
Cloud provider autoscalers don't know which VM to delete when scaling down so
they make sub-optimal decisions. Rather than teaching all autoscalers about GitLab
jobs, we prefer to have one, GitLab-owned autoscaler (not in the plugin).
It will also ensure that we can shape the future of the mechanism and make decisions
that fit our needs and requirements.
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## Plugin boundary proposals
The following are proposals for where to draw the plugin boundary. We will evaluate
these proposals and others by the design principles and technical constraints
listed above.
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### Custom provider
In order to reduce the scope of work, we only want to introduce the new
abstraction layer in one place.
A few years ago we introduced the [Custom Executor ](https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/executors/custom.html )
feature in GitLab Runner. It allows users to design custom build execution
methods. The custom executor driver can be implemented in any way - from a
simple shell script to a dedicated binary - that is then used by a Runner
through os/exec system calls.
Thanks to the custom executor abstraction there is no more need to implement
new executors internally in Runner. Users who have specific needs can implement
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their own drivers and don't need to wait for us to make their work part of the
"official" GitLab Runner. As each driver is a separate project, it also makes
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it easier to create communities around them, where interested people can
collaborate together on improvements and bug fixes.
We want to design the new Custom Provider to replicate the success of the
Custom Executor. It will make it easier for users to build their own ways to
provide a context and an environment in which a build will be executed by one
of the Custom Executors.
There are multiple solutions to implementing a custom provider abstraction. We
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can use raw Go plugins, Hashcorp's Go Plugin, HTTP interface or gRPC based
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facade service. There are many solutions, and we want to choose the most
optimal one. In order to do that, we will describe the solutions in a separate
document, define requirements and score the solution accordingly. This will
allow us to choose a solution that will work best for us and the wider
community.
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This proposal places VM lifecycle and autoscaling concerns as well as job to
VM mapping (routing) into the plugin. The build need only ask for a VM and
it will get one with all aspects of lifecycle and routing already accounted
for by the plugin.
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Rationale: [Description of the Custom Executor Provider proposal ](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/issues/28848#note_823321515 )
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### Fleeting VM provider
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We can introduce a more simple version of the `Machine` abstraction in the
form of a "Fleeting" interface. Fleeting provides a low-level interface to
a homogenous VM group which allows increasing and decreasing the set size
as well as consuming a VM from within the set.
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Plugins for cloud providers and other VM sources are implemented via the
Hashicorp go-plugin library. This is in practice gRPC over STDIN/STDOUT
but other wire protocols can be used also.
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In order to make use of the new interface, the autoscaling logic is pulled
out of the Docker Executor and placed into a new Taskscaler library.
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This places the concerns of VM lifecycle, VM shape and job routing within
the plugin. It also places the conern of VM autoscaling into a separate
component so it can be used by multiple Runner Executors (not just `docker+autoscaling` ).
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Rationale: [Description of the InstanceGroup / Fleeting proposal ](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/issues/28848#note_823430883 )
POC: [Merge request ](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/merge_requests/3315 )
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## Status
Status: RFC.
## Who
Proposal:
<!-- vale gitlab.Spelling = NO -->
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| Role | Who |
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|------------------------------|-------------------------------------------------|
| Authors | Grzegorz Bizon, Tomasz Maczukin, Joseph Burnett |
| Architecture Evolution Coach | Kamil Trzciński |
| Engineering Leader | Elliot Rushton, Cheryl Li |
| Product Manager | Darren Eastman, Jackie Porter |
| Domain Expert / Runner | Arran Walker |
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DRIs:
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| Role | Who |
|-------------|-----------------|
| Leadership | Elliot Rushton |
| Product | Darren Eastman |
| Engineering | Tomasz Maczukin |
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Domain experts:
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| Area | Who |
|------------------------|--------------|
| Domain Expert / Runner | Arran Walker |
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<!-- vale gitlab.Spelling = YES -->
